According to Stephen Wisenthal in The Australian Financial Review (27/8/2007, p.14), Woodside Petroleum managing director Don Voelte sees the latest next big thing, the $12 billion Pluto LNG project, as the ticket to an almost permanent growth path.

Strategy is merely a concept: Voelte insists the strategy he describes for sharing the gas produced from its 50 per cent owned Browse project, 1000 kilometres north of the North-West Shelf, is merely a concept. Still, he’s got a pretty clear idea. Thirty per cent could go to a 6 million tonne a year LNG expansion of Pluto, of which Woodside owns 100 per cent, leaving the rest of Browse to supply an expansion of the North-West Shelf Project.

Conveyor-belt approach: The early production could come from the North-West Shelf fields which, when depleted, Woodside would potentially use to store waste carbon dioxide it stripped out during processing. The conveyor-belt approach of building a new plant every couple of years will also help Woodside get ahead in the battle for skilled people, says Voelte. “In the LNG business, people have jumped from company to company as projects come along, once every 10 years,” he says. “What we’ll be able to do is offer them a career. We’ve hired a few people recently, some of the best in the industry, because they know they’ve got five or six trains coming to work on, and they can stay in one company, in lovely Perth, lovely Australia, to raise their families, and let their kids go continuously to schools.”